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IBM’s Watson Goes to Medical School

IBM’s Watson is not only smart enough to win at Jeopardy, it’s got what it takes to be a valuable expert resource for physicians responsible for making complex healthcare decisions. According to a recent article in Robotics Trends entitled The Robot Will See You Now, the IBM Watson team has demonstrated how Watson can utilize the same skills it employed for its Jeopardy win, to now aid doctors in diagnosing illnesses and recommending treatments. These breakthroughs in the area of cognitive computing are providing humans with a new partner for helping with complex knowledge processing tasks.

Watson has enormous processing power. According to sources, Watson is capable of processing the equivalent of a million books per seconds. Combine Watson’s processing horsepower with its language processing and question analyzing and answering skills, and it can search through data and make associations far more quickly than a human can. According to the Robotics Trends article, Memorial Sloan-Kettering, a top institution in the area of cancer research and treatment, is working with IBM to teach Watson the latest information from medical research, symptom analysis, and treatment options. Medical documentation from hundreds of sources is growing exponentially. All of the data is valuable, but a human physician has no way of keeping up with the deluge of information.

That’s where Watson comes in. With its tireless ability to ingest unstructured data and understand relationships and trends within the information, Watson can sort through whole libraries in seconds and recommend possible matches between symptoms, diagnoses, and treatments. Watson also has the ability to learn, which means that its understanding of medical literature and real life medical cases is constantly expanding. And though none of the articles discuss this point, Watson is not subject to unconscious human bias and anchoring, which can cause physicians to make a diagnosis based on only one or two symptoms, while ignoring other possibly important inputs.